Word: climatologists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...expertise. Apart from Thomson, our list of America's Best includes pioneers in a wide range of fields. Although few of these areas are as controversial as stem-cell research, they are all just as important to the way we live our daily lives. Among them: Lonnie Thompson, a climatologist who scales mountaintops to better understand global warming; Elizabeth Spelke, a developmental psychologist who has shown that babies are smarter than we thought...
Partly in response to this deadlock, NASA climatologist James Hansen last week unveiled an alternative strategy. Instead of pursuing the politically unpopular goal of drastically reducing consumption of fossil fuels, he suggests going after other greenhouse gases, such as methane, which he thinks has accounted for as much warming as carbon dioxide in the past century, even though it is present in the atmosphere in much smaller quantities...
...Wallace right about this? No one yet knows. We are tampering with systems that are so complex that scientists are struggling to understand them. Climatologist Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, for one, fervently believes the answer to our problems lies not just in improved knowledge of the climate system but in technological advances that could counter--and perhaps reverse--present trends. In other words, the farfetched dreams that prominent scientists like Von Neumann once harbored have not died. Rather they have been transformed and, in the process, become more urgent...
...might think that, knowing what causes greenhouse warming, it would be an easy matter to predict how hot the world will be in the next century. Unfortunately, things aren't that simple. The world is a complex place, and reducing it to the climatologist's tool of choice--the computer model--isn't easy. Around almost every statement in the greenhouse debate is a penumbra of uncertainty that results from our current inability to capture the full complexity of the planet in our models...
...very efficiently, the same task could be performed by swarms of independent thunderstorms. It takes a certain amount of magic, in other words, to set a hurricane in motion. First, you have to make the thunderstorms, and then "you have to get the thunderstorms dancing," as Florida State University climatologist James O'Brien puts it. "You have to get them dancing in a big circle dance...